[Purdue-pm] new Rakudo Star Perl 6

[Mark Senn]

Purdue Perl Mongers,

I've been using the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6.  It is (get ready
for it, because I hardly ever use this word) awesome.  A much better
language than Perl 5 in my opinion.  Even if you don't use Perl you
may want to keep tabs on Perl 6---my guess is other languages will
borrow features from it.

If there is time after the other talks at the next Perl Mogers meeting on
May 17 (see http://pm.purdue.org/Wiki/wiki.pl for details) I'll be givig
a talk on "A Perl 6 Grammar for Home Automation" that uses the new Perl
6 grammar feature to simplify input parsing.  I'll also show how to
use other new features of Perl 6.

-mark

Here is the announcement for the new Rakudo Star implementation of Perl 6.
I haven't tried using this new version yet.

>Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:25:16 -0500
>From: "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com>
>To: perl6-compiler at perl.org, perl6-language at perl.org, perl6-users at perl.org,
>        parrot-dev at lists.parrot.org
>Subject: Announce: Rakudo Star 2011.04 released
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>On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
>announce the April 2011 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
>distribution of Perl 6.  The tarball for the April 2011 release is
>available from <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
>
>Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6.  We know that
>it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and
>there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification
>that aren't implemented yet.  But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form
>is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications
>and exploring a great new language.  These "Star" releases are
>intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow
>the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the
>Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.
>
>In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language 
>("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as
>"Rakudo Perl".  The April 2011 Star release includes release #40
>of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 3.3.0 of the Parrot 
>Virtual Machine [2], and various modules, documentation,
>and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.
>
>This release of Rakudo Star adds the following features over the
>previous Star release:
>  * Modules MiniDBI, form, HTTP::Daemon, Yaml and Module::Tools are
>    removed in this release. 
>  * New modules Pies (including panda, the module installer) and 
>    HTTP::Server::Simple have been added.
>  * New implementation of IO::Socket::INET, with basic IPv6 support
>  * -p and -n command-line options are now available
>  * Many new IO improvements, including stat-related methods
>  * New --ll-backtrace command-line switch for printing PIR level stack traces
>  * Preliminary implementation of Infix 'orelse'
>  * Added Str.indent
>  * Bugfixes to negation meta operator
>  * Support for complex conjugation
>    
>There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not
>yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming
>releases.  Some of the not-quite-there features include:
>  * nested package definitions
>  * binary objects, native types, pack and unpack
>  * typed arrays
>  * macros
>  * state variables
>  * threads and concurrency
>  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
>  * pre and post constraints, and some other phasers
>  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
>  * backslash escapes in regex <[...]> character classes
>  * non-blocking I/O
>  * most of Synopsis 9
>  * perl6doc or pod manipulation tools
>
>In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
>programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are
>many that we've missed.  Bug reports about missing and broken
>features are welcomed at <rakudobug at perl.org>.
>
>See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about 
>Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
>materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources.
>An updated draft of a Perl 6 book is available as 
><docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf> in the release tarball.
>
>The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors
>for making Rakudo Star possible.  If you would like to contribute,
>see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the perl6-compiler at perl.org
>mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
>
>Rakudo Star releases are created on a three-month cycle, or as 
>needed in response to important bug fixes or improvements.  
>(The Rakudo compiler will continue with monthly releases.)  
>The next planned release of Rakudo Star will be in July 2011.
>
>[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
>[2] http://parrot.org/